“Life… is to remember a sad awakening in a train at dawn.” The book is a small essay, coming from a degree thesis. The style is therefore that of a scientific work, where the narration is often interspersed with quotations, engraved by other authors and, precisely, accurate reproposition of poetic verses by Sandro Penna. A literary criticism beyond the usual stakes, in which the author offers us his litmus test to understand Penna as an...
“Only by becoming economically independent will the woman escape moral parasitism, and will be able to conquer her freedom, dignity and true respect for the opposite sex.” The book is a milestone in the history of female emancipation, written by one of the most symbolic characters of European political and social life of the early twentieth century: Anna Kuliscioff. This is not an indictment against men but the legitimacy of rights commonly denied to women...
“In life, if one wants to understand, to truly understand how things are in this world, he must die at least once.” During a car trip with a couple of friends and their child, in the countryside of central Italy, some reflections on the Etruscan civilization open the doors of the author’s memory, who finds himself in a moment to remember events that occurred during his youth in his Ferrara. A dip in the past...
“Even though I wasn’t happy with my situation and that relationship, I was afraid to get out of it and I was beginning to be a slave to my fear.” The book is the raw chronicle of a physical and psychological violence suffered over time by a girl. Salt on the open wounds of our society that must make us think, because it is not a fictional story, but experienced firsthand by the author. So,...
“The Vietnam war has been revealed by the most disastrous of all America’s ventures in all two hundred years of its history.” A historical monograph that is always pleasant to read. A flight suspended over almost fifty years of political and geopolitical events explained in a clear and linear way. The absence of frills and quotes, or an excessive load of dates, makes reading them pleasant and, even more important, smooth. Having a good base...
“History is a fish inside an aquarium, it comes and goes under your nose without you ever catching it. You can only imagine about how it could once, but nothing else, nothing else…” Set in the 30s of the last century, with the noises of the Second World War, first weak and then louder and louder, the book deals with the events of a family of the Italian-Swiss upper middle class. In the muffled atmosphere...
“Dora always said that beautiful things fail if you put them in front of people who are not up to understanding them.” The novel begins with a dismissal. A strong cut with the threads of the past unknown to the reader, which will be recomposed, in a soft emotional carpet. The victims of the dismissal, a group of four editors of a magazine, see their lives and planned lives reset to zero from one moment to...
“Sometimes a thin thread is enough to discover something.“ Fast-paced thriller, with a sustained rhythm capable of involving the reader. Even the least passionate of the genre, will not stop to read it, at lease up to three-quarters of the story. But then the trouble comes, and you start to feel the weight of the many scattered technical explanations. Military procedures, armaments, institutional procedures and street references, that are simply too much; but after all...
“This customer is the only one with whom I could have been friends. But there is no place for two in his world.” Freely inspired in the content, format and graphic part of the enchanting work Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “the little barman” succeeds in the difficult task of creating his own identity. A path certainly tortuous and full of pitfalls, which however the author manages to complete Set in a timeless night, but in a...
“As we walked melancholy towards home, a question filled us with feelings of guilt: were war, unemployment, the lack of a home, poverty perhaps a calling for us?” A story of unexpected gentleness. A slow snowfall on Christmas day when you are a child, greeted by the warmth of home and a glass of hot milk. This is the feeling we experienced at the end of reading Mangereta, with the only regret that there were...
